Achieving Emotional Literacy by Dr Claude Steiner (Bloomsbury, £16.99) Are you emotionally literate? Do you know your true feelings? Do you recognise other people's feelings? Are you someone who finds it easy to apologise? Are you in control of your emotions? These are the five basic skills needed to improve emotional literacy: the ability to understand and handle difficult emotional situations that often lead to lying, fighting, lashing out or hurting people. The way we respond to other people or how we react in fraught or complex situations can determine how we succeed both in our personal and professional lives. A clinical psychologist, Dr Steiner has created an easy-to-follow, three-stage training programme which he terms opening the heart, surveying the emotional landscape and taking responsibility.
Relationships And Sexuality by Carmel Wynne (Mercier, £7.99)
As a teacher of relationship and sexuality education in both primary and secondary schools, Carmel Wynne brings considerable experience to this practical handbook for parents and teachers and anyone who is concerned with the healthy sexual and emotional development of young people. She supports communication about sexual issues between children and adults and places these issues firmly back in the context of family communications and intimacy between parents.
Getting A Life: The Downshifter's Guide To Happier Simpler Living by Polly Ghazi and Judy Jones (Hodder and Stoughton, £9.99)
This book is based on both authors' personal journeys from overloaded lives dominated by their careers as journalists on the Observer to, as they put it, "getting a life". Quoting Simone de Beauvoir - "Life is about more than just maintaining oneself, it is about extending oneself. Otherwise living is only not dying" - the book moves from ideology to the practical side of downshifting: preparing for change, money, new ways of working, household management, keeping up appearances and ultimately, more leisure and pleasure.
Protecting Your Baby-To-Be by Margie Profet (Little, Brown, £6.99).
Margie Profet is a 1993 MacArthur Prize Fellowshipwinning evolutionary biologist. She believes that morning sickness has evolved since Stone Age days to shield the human embryo from potentially harmful toxins found in many foods which have molecules too small to be kept out by the placental barrier. Profet concentrates on the first three months of pregnancy, when the embryo's organs begin to form and are at their peak of vulnerability from foreign bodies. This is a time when defects are most likely to occur and ways of minimising the risk of birth defects are suggested by outlining good and bad foods.
The Infertility Companion: A User's Guide To Tests, Tech- nology And Therapies by Anna Furse (Thorsons, £9.99)
Going through infertility treatment can be demoralising, physically painful and tiring. It can make a woman feel powerless and there is no guarantee she'll be a mother at the end. Up-to-date information about available treatments can be the key to regaining control and making decisions. Difficult questions, from when to start and when to stop, on to other options such as fostering and adoption, are all covered. Anna Furze writes with some authority, having journeyed the infertility road for many years before giving birth herself.